Source: Alex Dobie / Android Central
Meta has announced via Twitter that it is renaming the “News Feed” for the first time since it was introduced to the platform in 2006. From now on, it will just be referred to as “Feed.”
This marks the latest name change after last year’s big company rebrand from “Facebook” to “Meta,” which earlier this year has expanded to the company’s VR headsets like the Quest 2, dropping the well-known “Oculus” branding for “Meta.” That said, this rebranding is not nearly as drastic.
It’s a curious change for the company to make in the following controversies around misinformation, not to mention the efforts Meta has made to boost its own moderation over news posts that appear on the “Feed.”
That said, the Facebook app has a dedicated “News” tab separate from the regular feed, so the move could also be an attempt to avoid any confusion between the two feeds.
We reached out to Meta to gain more insight into the decision to rebrand the feed. The company wasn’t immediately available to respond, but a spokesperson told The Verge that the change was made “to better reflect the diverse content people see on their Feeds” and that it “does not impact the app experience more broadly.”
Meanwhile, Meta has been making more drastic changes to the Instagram feed, testing ways for people to adjust their feeds based on what they’d prefer to see. This includes a return to the chronological feed that the company retired years ago. These changes are being made following Instagram’s recent controversy over its effects on teen mental health.
